News / December / 2017

On Sunday the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) receives the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. It is a slap in the face for Norway’s Blue-Blue government which brought the organisation to its knees two years ago by cutting all its funds. Norwegian aid accounted for almost 90 per cent of ICAN’s budget.

Massive cuts have pushed Finnish aid to its lowest level in a decade, reports the OECD peer review of Finland. The Paris-based aid watchdog calls on the Finnish government to produce a roadmap for restoring support to the poorest countries and raising aid to 0.7 per cent of GNI.

Despite several years of diplomatic efforts, Norway has failed to convince the OECD to allow disarmament efforts to be reported as Official Development Assistance (ODA). Norway has nevertheless spent hundreds of millions of aid crowns to fund its Humanitarian Initiative on Nuclear Weapons, in violation of repeated rulings from the OECD.

Anuradha Gupta, Deputy CEO of the vaccine alliance Gavi, says Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)’s legal challenge of a Pfizer patent in India could, if successful, contribute to making the pharmaceutical market more “healthy.” Revoking the patent would break Pfizer’s monopoly on pneumonia vaccine, opening the way for cheaper generic copies to enter the market.

The OECD has rejected a Norwegian bid to have NOK 54 million in funding for the transport of natural uranium from Kazakhstan to Iran approved as Official Development Assistance (ODA). The project was connected to the international agreement to downsize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.